Getting Started

BudgetBadger Business is built for day-to-day cash-basis tracking: money that hits your business banks and cards.

What it is good for:

• Seeing where cash went this month and which revenue and expense categories are rising
• Tracking your business's important financial metrics, e.g. profitability, efficiency
• Identifying opportunities for cost savings and keeping an eye on your business's financial health
• Keeping a living chart of accounts without rebuilding books from scratch
• Sharing P&L or Balance Sheet exports with a co-founder or CPA for year-end tax preparation

What it is not good for:

• Tax preparation, advice, or filing
• Invoicing, accounts receivable/payable, or full inventory accounting
• A live QuickBooks (or other) general-ledger sync
• Accrual-based accounting

Keep a CPA for taxes. Use BudgetBadger to understand your business's financial health, spot operational issues through financial metrics, and find ways to optimize your business' growth and profitability.

Using the Setup Checklist is the best way to get started with BudgetBadger Business. The Setup Checklist is a banner that appears upon registration and login at the top of the primary BudgetBadger pages (e.g. Accounts), and checks off each step as you complete it. Clicking each item in the Setup Checklist opens the relevant page, guiding you through the process.

A typical Setup Checklist flow is as follows:

1. Add 1 account — On the Accounts page, click Add Account, then click Connect Account, and connect a business bank or card using the Plaid workflow. BudgetBadger requests up to 730 days of history (about two years); actual history synced depends on each institution.
2. Add 1 transaction — Synced accounts usually create this step automatically once transactions import. If you use a manual account, add at least one transaction on the Transactions page using the green Add button so the checklist can continue.
3. Customize categories — Open the Categories page and review the default Business chart of accounts. Add, rename, or remove categories so the eight groups match how your business tracks revenue and expenses.
4. Review transactions — Return to the Transactions page and recategorize synced activity as needed. A popup will appear in the bottom right of the screen after recategorizing a transaction, asking you if you want to create a rule and run that rule on all historical transactions. You can also use the bulk assign process (by selecting multiple row checkboxes and pressing the green Assign button) for recategorizing batches of similar merchants.
5. Create 1 category rule — On the Rules page, create at least one category rule so categorization of synced transactions are predictable and performed automatically, so you don't have to manually recategorize in the future.

There are also three optional setup features on the Settings page:

• Budgeting — Set budget targets for your categories and track performance against your budget on the P&L page. See Budgeting for more details.
• Match Bank Statements — Match your bank statements to your BudgetBadger transactions, which is useful for reconciling your bank statements and ensuring your transactions are categorized correctly. See Match Bank Statements for more details.
• Display Currency — Set your preferred currency for displayed amounts thoughout the BudgetBadger platform, which is particularly useful for multi-currency businesses. See Display Currency for more details.

Once you have completed the Setup Checklist, it is important to get your first month's P&L right and your business's financial metrics set up on the Dashboard before you trust Gross Profit or Net Income.

Below are some suggested steps to set yourself up for success:

1. On the Transactions page, update the categories for Transfers, Credit Card Payments, and obvious personal spend to ensure non-business transactions are not included in your P&L and metrics.
2. Create a handful or more of high-confidence category rules for recurring merchants, then run those rules on historical transactions or use bulk assign for similar batches. Some businesses may even have 30+ rules to start with, which helps automate the data cleaning process to a large extent for future reporting and analysis.
3. Navigate to the P&L page and review your P&L report for the last fully completed month. Spot-check a few large or surprising lines via drill-down (by clicking on the value) to confirm accuracy and identify any issues.
4. For ecommerce businesses, connect platform integrations (Stripe, Etsy, Shopify, Amazon) on the Integrations page if you use them. Platform payout matching works best once banks are linked and categories are roughly clean.

The more time you invest in the data cleaning and setup process, the more time you will save in the future and the more automated your P&L reports and metrics will be.

If you currently track your business finances using a spreadsheet or accounting software today, we recommend getting started with BudgetBadger Business by following the Setup Checklist and first connecting your banks and cards using the Connect Accounts workflow on the Accounts page, which syncs your accounts using Plaid.

For older history that Plaid does not cover, you can use the Upload CSV feature on the Transactions page to import your historical transactions if you would like to bring over more historical data into BudgetBadger. See Importing Historical Transactions From CSV for more details.

Once the Setup Checklist is complete, sanity-check your Business P&L on the P&L page for a recent period and compare it to your spreadsheet or accounting software (if consistency and continuity is important to you). BudgetBadger does not promise full historical books parity, and often depends on the consistency of your transaction categorization that determines how closely your P&L will match your spreadsheet or accounting software.

While BudgetBadger Business replaces day-to-day books and cash P&L tracking, it does not prepare or file taxes on behalf of businesses. If you need tax preparation services, we recommend hiring a CPA or tax preparer.

Connect the accounts that drive business cash flow, which are typically business checking, savings, and credit cards. Investment and loan accounts can still be linked for Balance Sheet completeness, but will not be the drivers of your P&L performance or business operating metrics.

BudgetBadger uses Plaid to connect your accounts, which supports over 10,000 financial institutions across the United States and Canada, covering nearly all major banks and credit unions. It also supports digital wallets like PayPal, Wise, and Venmo.

While business-facing accounts are preferred for syncing with BudgetBadger Business, personal transactions can often land in a shared account. In this case, we recommend recategorizing personal transactions or use Excluded from P&L categories so they do not distort business operating results. See Business Owner Draws and Mixed Personal/Business Spending for more details.

On the Accounts page, click Add Account, then Connect Account. You will then be prompted to complete a secure workflow using Plaid, which will then connect your accounts and sync your transactions. BudgetBadger has read-only access to your accounts data and does not have visibility into or store your bank credentials, so we cannot move money or change bank account settings.

BudgetBadger requests up to 730 days of history when you connect your accounts (about two years). After the first sync, posted transactions refresh automatically about every six hours. You may add up to 30 synced accounts and add unlimited manual accounts.

For users who sell on Stripe, Etsy, Shopify, or Amazon, the BudgetBadger Integrations feature provides critical visibility into platform-specific revenue, expenses, and metrics, not just bank deposits categorized entirely as revenue.

Below is a suggested path to set up BudgetBadger for your ecommerce business:

1. Connect business banks and cards on the Accounts page and finish the Setup Checklist.
2. Clean Transfers, Credit Card Payments, and obvious miscategorizations for your most recent months.
3. Navigate to the Integrations page and connect each platform through the authentication and syncing workflows.
4. Once back on the Settings page, link the checking/savings accounts where payouts land and update the split categories preferences (if needed).
5. Spot-check matched deposits on the Transactions page. Your platform payouts should be split into the appropriate categories, e.g. revenue, refunds, fees, etc.
6. Open Dashboard → Platform Analytics and customize the widgets to your specific needs.

You will know you have successfully set up BudgetBadger for your ecommerce business when you see platform deposits appear as split transactions on the Transactions page (e.g. revenue, refunds, fees) instead of a single transaction.

A common mistake is connecting platforms before banks are linked, so platform data won't be able to match to your bank deposits. In these cases, you can later sync your accounts and press the Sync Now button on the Integrations page to re-run the matching process.

If there are unmatched deposits that appear on the Integrations page, you can click on it to review the details and fix. Feel free to reach out to support on the Contact page if you need assistance.

See the Integrations section for more details.

Service and trades businesses (electrician, plumber, consultant, and similar) often need a simple mapping from job payments, materials, trucks or tools, and owner draws onto the Business chart of accounts.

Example path:

1. Connect the business checking and cards you actually use for jobs.
2. Map activity to the default categories: job deposits → Revenue; job materials → Direct Costs; subcontractors → Contractors & Consultants; tools/supplies → Office & Admin; owner distributions → Transfers.
3. Create a few specific categories on the Categories page for recurring or unique activity that does not fit into the default categories, e.g. truck or fuel expenses.
4. Create a few category rules for recurring suppliers and platforms to automate the data cleanup and categorization process as much as possible, then review last month’s P&L so it matches your expectations.

For mixed personal spend on business cards, see Business Owner Draws and Mixed Personal/Business Spending.

BudgetBadger supports transactions from all common international currencies and supports both USD and CAD as display currencies, so all data is consistently displayed in your preferred currency throughout the BudgetBadger platform. You may set your currency preference on the Settings page. Amounts from foreign-currency transactions are converted to your preferred display currency (USD or CAD) and will appear consistently in that currency across the platform.

Workspace invites let a co-founder, bookkeeper, or accountant work in the same Business books without sharing the owner’s login.

BudgetBadger Business owners can invite up to three teammates from the Settings page:

• Invitees must use a Business account. BudgetBadger Personal accounts cannot join a Business workspace (they would need a separate Business email and registration).
• Each member gets their own login and can connect accounts and categorize in the shared workspace.
• If someone choose to leave the account using the process on the Settings page, their accounts and transactions are removed, while the owner’s data remains in BudgetBadger.